1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to hypermedia authoring tools and more particularly to automatic formatting for creating an electronic file format for card-based hypermedia documents without the knowledge of the target document format.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Traditionally, hypermedia applications and documents are interactively designed and created with hypermedia authoring tools. These tools store the documents in a file format that is often closed and proprietary. Typically, formatting commands are attached to document objects interactively, and the proprietary format representation is generated and saved in a file when the user selects a xe2x80x9cSavexe2x80x9d command from the user interface. Various commercial authoring tools may use different interactive authoring paradigms but there are limitations in directly supporting an automatic formatting process. The representative authoring tools are summarized as follows.
Authorware from Macromedia and IconAuthor from AimTech, based on a flowchart model, use icons representing events such as audio or video, if-then functions, branching and hyperlinks in a linear progression like flowchart control. The user could use content editors to assign real media files and properties to each icon. This model provides a high-level program control and global ordering of information presentation.
Director from Macromedia, based on a time-line model, displays media sequences as tracks and specializes in synchronizing events. It can be used to create high-level multimedia presentation.
Multimedia Toolbook from Asymetrix, based on an object-oriented model with scripting capability, provides more support of complex interaction behavior. Users can interactively enter document content (in multimedia objects) and define object properties including various formatting commands and scripts for object behavior. It also provides a complete programmatic mechanism to authoring the objects. That is, for any interactive authoring operations, there is a corresponding script command for programmatic authoring. Script-based authoring allows the user to get to lower-level control of object and system behavior with script commands, as opposed to interactive commands.
Powerpoint from Microsoft, based on a structure-oriented model, supports hierarchical information content authoring in a 2D layout. Many commercial word processing tools follow this authoring model. Documents are often developed in terms of hierarchal structures such as book, pages or slides, sections, subsections, etc., and WYSWIG user interfaces are provided to support structure editing, and issue formatting commands interactively.
The present invention provides a new approach of automatic formatting for creating an electronic file format for card-based hypermedia documents without the knowledge of the target document format. An automatic formatting process is a process to programmatically create a document file format for hypermedia documents. However, if the file format is closed and proprietary as in commercial hypermedia authoring tools, creating such a document file format directly in an automatic formatting process is not possible. The script-based formatting process of the present invention includes an automated method for generating formatting scripts which, at run-time, are used by a commercial authoring tool to generate the document file format. With this approach, it is possible to take advantage of the script interpreter capabilities rather than interactive editing capabilities in authoring tools. Without support of such an automatic formatting mechanism, creating large-scale card-based hypermedia documents with interactive authoring tools becomes a monumental and tedious job.
The present invention comprises a mixer where descriptions about document objects, called formatting object descriptions, are obtained by attaching formatting commands to document contents through a pre-processing procedure. The formatting object descriptions are input to an automatic scripting module which generates formatting scripts. The automatic scripting module includes a Hypermedia Card Format (HCF) generator and a formatting script interpreter. At run-time, the formatting scripts are used by a commercial authoring tool to generate the document file format. The formatting scripts are executed by the authoring tools"" script interpreter to generate card-based hypermedia documents.